Before and After Gender : Sexual Mythologies of Everyday Life

Marilyn Strathern

• Publisher: HAU Books
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9780986132537
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Written in the early 1970s amidst widespread debate over the causes of gender inequality, Marilyn Strathern's Before and After Gender was intended as a widely accessible analysis of gender as a powerful cultural code and sex as a defining mythology. But when the series for which it was written unexpectedly folded, the manuscript went into storage, where it remained for more than four decades. This book finally brings it to light, giving the long-lost feminist work—accompanied here by an afterword from Judith Butler—an overdue spot in feminist history. Strathern incisively engages some of the leading feminist thinkers of the time. Building with characteristic precision toward a bold conclusion in which she argues that we underestimate the materializing grammars of sex and gender at our own peril, she offers a powerful challenge to the intransigent mythologies of sex that still plague contemporary society. The result is a sweeping display of Strathern's vivid critical thought.

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Original Acknowledgments
• Editorial Note
• Editor’s Introduction: “The Riddle of Gender” by Sarah Franklin
• Preface: “Concepts in Transition” by Marilyn Strathern
• Chapter One: The Seductive Symbol
• Chapter Two: Stereotypes
• Chapter Three: Families and Housewives
• Chapter Four: The World Outside
• Chapter Five: Dependency
• Chapter Six: Sex and the Concept of the Person
• Chapter Seven: Sex and the Social Order
• Afterword by Judith Butler
• References
• Index of Names